Experiences with object group systems

The GARF, Bast, and OGS systems represent the resulting efforts of a multi‐year ‘object group’ program at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. The intent of the program was to understand the extent to which one could build flexible and performance system supports to encapsulate object plurality. That is, we experimented with various ways to build libraries and services to support object groups in a distributed setting. This paper summarizes the main steps of the efforts and draws some conclusions about the successes and failures of our approaches. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.